"Boss Lincoln" by Matthew Pinsker

"A High Price for Freedom" by Clyde W. Ford

Don’t expect a big celebration on Juneteenth (June 19) from author Clyde W. Ford, who explains in A High Price for Freedom. “What a wonderful day that first Juneteenth must have been. Fetters gone. Shackles removed. Whips silenced. Uninformed formerly enslaved men and women reveling in their newly-found freedom. But there’s a problem with this idyllic picture of Juneteenth—most of the above events never happened, even though they are taken as unquestioned truth by Americans Black and white,” stated Ford. The facts, the author declares, are that, first of all, slaves in Texas were aware of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. “We had papers just like we have now,” said Felix Haywood, a former slave who was in Texas for the first Juneteenth, when interviewed in the 1930s at the age of 92. The 2,000 Union troops that went to Texas after the Civil War didn’t go to tell the slaves they were free, but to remind the white Texas slaveholders that they had to release those they continued to enslave, said Ford. Texas is where a lot of slaves wound up because, during the Civil War, a number of southern slaveholders marched as many as 150,000 Black men and women to Texas in order to keep them out of the Union Army’s hands, stated Ford, describing that movement as the second slavery trail of tears. The first one involved the transfer of slaves from tobacco states like Virginia and Maryland to the deep South in the 1830s when cotton became the chief crop. At about the same time that Major General George Granger was delivering his Juneteenth message to Texan slaveholders, President Andrew Johnson, having taken over that spring for the assassinated Abraham Lincoln, was derailing compensation plans for slaves worked out while Lincoln was still in office. “Union General William T. Sherman and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton seemed to recognize that President Lincoln needed a plan to deal with the four to five million men and women who would be freed by the Emancipation Proclamation if the Union prevailed in the war,” noted Ford. Rev. Garrison Frazier, himself a former slave, replied to questions from Sherman and Stanton on the evening of Jan. 12, 1865 at a meeting that sought to find an answer to a looming problem as the war drew to a close: the huge population of former slaves  “We want to be placed on land until we are able to buy it or make it our own,” said Frazier. Four days after the meeting, Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15, accepted by Lincoln and otherwise known as “40 acres and a mule,” said Ford. That order sought to redistribute 400,000 acres of prime Southern coastline to emancipated slaves, land that formerly belonged to Southern slaveholders. The plan was to allow African Americans to organize and govern their own communities, Ford said. But Johnson had other ideas. Shortly after Lincoln died in April 1865, Johnson issued 14,000 pardons to wealthy Southern slaveholders, and, within seven weeks of taking office, coinciding almost exactly with the first Juneteenth, Johnson rescinded Special Field Order No. 15. Any lands that had been confiscated were returned to their original owners, said Ford, recalling a quote from W.E.B. DuBois: “The slave went free, stood a brief moment in the sun, then moved back again toward slavery.” By June 1865, 40,000 Black Americans who had been awarded land were formally displaced, forced into becoming sharecroppers and tenant farmers. “Personally, as a Black Man, I find it very difficult to celebrate Juneteenth because what are we celebrating?” asked Ford. “Are you celebrating the fact that Black folks learned they were free? They already knew that. Or are you celebrating the fact that white folks were told to stop killing and brutalizing Black folks?" A High Price for Freedom features a number of other essays by Ford addressing the struggle for freedom by African Americans in the United States.

“Disposing of Modernity” by Rebecca Graff

If time travel ever becomes a thing, the Chicago World’s Fair held in 1893 might be one of the leading attractions for time travelers. Here was an exposition, spread across almost 700 acres in Jackson Park, some seven miles from Chicago’s Loop, that sold 27 million tickets in its six-month run. Some 200 buildings were erected that included displays from nations across the world, public comfort stations, soda pavilions, and restaurants. You had electricity and flush toilets for all to use. “Add to all of this an elevated train that looped around the fairgrounds, the sounds of tourists talking mixed with band concerts, sights of ‘Little Egypt’ performing the danse du ventre, or children doing gymnastics in the model kindergarten, smells of baking bread from the French bakery exhibit or beer and wurst from the German Village, and one starts to get a small sense of the teeming character of the 1893 fair,” noted Rebecca Graff, an anthropology professor at Lake Forest College. Graff recalled a teacher telling her grad-school class years earlier that the Chicago fair site was “the center of the world” 100 years ago. That motivated her to find out what was left of the great fair often cited as a watershed moment in the development of modern, industrial American society. The result is captured in Disposing of Modernity: The Archaeology of Garbage and Consumerism During Chicago’s 1893 World’s Fair, Graff's book that details some of what lay behind (or under) White City. To fully appreciate the 1893 event in Chicago, one must first understand the concept of a world’s fair. Between 1865 and 1925, 360 million people attended world’s fairs in Europe, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. “Fairs were venues within which to display the growing and changing material world,” noted Graff. The United States, and Chicago, in particular, were pulsing with power in 1893. While the U.S. frontier may have closed (Frederick Jackson Turner made that declaration in Chicago that year), the country was flexing its railroad and steam muscle in the era that became known as the Gilded Age.  Chicago, 20 years removed from the great fire, wanted to show its resurgence at the fair—not only as a meatpacking and transportation center, but also as a city with world-class architects such as Louis Sullivan and a young draftsman named Frank Lloyd Wright. The fair saw the introduction of the frankfurter that became known as the Chicago hot dog. White City was also criticized by Frederick Douglass, then ambassador to Haiti, for excluding African Americans from a more prominent role at the fair.  It was a transformative event. Six months later, it was gone. That kind of conspicuous disposal, the disposing of modernity, is one of the stories of White City.

“The Courtyard” by Alexa Morris and Benjamin Parket

The Nazi occupation of Paris during World War II brought hardship to many, especially if they were Jewish. As German rule tightened, Jewish families were at risk of being rounded up and sent to concentration camps like Auschwitz. The Courtyard is an account of one Jewish family that survived the war thanks to the assistance of brave neighbors and a miracle or two along the way, said Morris, whose father-in law was Ben Parket. Morris said the book came about through her collaboration with Parket, who turns 93 this summer. Before war broke out, the Parkets—Ben, his parents, and two older brothers—lived in a tiny but sunny fourth-floor apartment that overlooked a large, open courtyard, a busy place in the heart of Paris, a center of industry, she said. “The neighborhood was known for woodworking with furniture makers, upholsterers, and painters busy at their trade. Ben’s father, Joseph, was a varnisher who had his workshop in the same courtyard,” said Morris. In August of 1941, Joseph Parket was arrested along with other Jewish men who had immigrated from Eastern Europe. He was detained in a camp outside Paris that would become the primary French gateway to Auschwitz. The first of the miracles occurred when Joseph was released due to illness and sent home in November. “During the entire war, only 800 of the 70,000 people detained at the camp were ever released,” noted Morris. Ben’s father came home and recovered, but in July of 1942, the entire family was marked for arrest. Luckily, a courtyard neighbor who worked at the police station warned the Parket family in advance. The family wound up staying in an empty warehouse nearby. They made do in a single room the size of a one-car garage for two years without electricity, plumbing, or running water. At night, they had to be completely silent. “Protecting the family was a true community effort,” said Morris. Neighboring shopkeepers—a grocer and a deli owner—set aside food for the family each day, food that nine-year-old Ben had to go and collect each day, a task that "should have been terrifying, but Ben said it wasn’t. Perhaps because it was his only time outside, it became his favorite part of the day,” she said. After the war, the Parket family emigrated to Israel before Ben, on his own, traveled to the United States for college. He attended Stanford University and settled in the Bay Area. He was an architect until he retired in his 50s. Perhaps because of the time he spent hiding during the war, Ben developed a passion for the outdoors, said Morris, noting that he remains an avid biker and hiker to this day.

“The Devil’s Castle” by Susanne Paola Antonetta

The horrors of the Holocaust were preceded in Nazi Germany by the conversion of five asylums and an abandoned jail, which were transformed into gas chambers, killing tens of thousands of patients.  That’s a story that Susanne Paola Antonetta tells in The Devil’s Castle, a book that started with the Nazi massacre of the disabled, she said. “The subtitle, Nazi Eugenics, Euthanasia, and How Psychiatry’s Troubled History Reverberates Today, grew with the book,” stated Antonetta. ”Euthanasia grew out of the 19th-century eugenics movement, the drive to remove ‘tainted’ hereditary lines from society. Eugenics flourished in the United States before and after the war. It hasn’t ended,” she stated. Antonetta focuses on several people in the history she provides for a book she said took eight years to compile. “I even had to learn another language: German,” she stated. Two of Antonetta’s “heroes” are Paul Schreber, a German judge who was able to make his own case to force his release from an asylum, and Dorothea Buck, a longtime activist who wrote lucidly of her own psychotic episodes. “Buck had a vision in 1936 of Hitler’s coming war proving ‘monstrous.’ Buck’s mother took her to a doctor, the vision of monstrous war a symptom, like the loony cartoon prophet’s apocalypse sign. If only millions of people had had her symptom,” noted Antonetta. Buck died in 2019 at the age of 102, said Antonetta, who “found her book, her talks, her letters.” “I followed her star with her during my own psychotic break,” said the author, who’s had to deal with her own bipolar condition. Another major figure in the book is Emil Kraepelin, a German psychiatrist who was both eugenicist and anti-semite. Kraepelin believed Jews had a natural connection to mental illness, and he trained some of the worst Nazi doctors, noted Antonetta. Kraepelin, who died in 1926, remains popular, even considered “the father of modern psychiatry,” having devised an elaborate system of psychiatric classification, she said. The title of the book refers to what the asylum known as Sonnenstein later became called. Once a castle-fortress dating back to the Middle Ages, the buildings were renovated in the 15th and 16th centuries. In 1811, the Prussian government established an asylum at one end of the sprawling fortress. Antonetta noted that a study of how society treats mental problems shows that ideas on finding a cure often change over time. Under its first director, Ernst Pienitz, Sonnenstein became Europe’s pinnacle asylum, said Antonetta. Pienetz released a quarter of his patients, fully cured, within a year of their entry, remarkable for that time and that patient population, she said. The reputation made Sonnenstein a teaching hospital, the destination for hundreds of doctors to learn how mental illness could be treated humanely , said Antonetta, noting that less than a century later, the once-fabled institution had become a killing ground “where patients died by gas and were thrown in the river below in the form of ash.” While stressing the failures in the treatment of mentally disabled people, Antonetta sees progress being made despite a reliance on drugs for treatment. She looks to the future and calls for change. “It’s time to end the use of the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) in psychiatry,” she said. “This work is the fruit of the poisoned tree, in its Kraepelinian roots and in its development by those with a financial stake in finding people ill.”

“Why Q Needs U” by Danny Bate

So where did we get all these letters that children learn as their ABC’s? Danny Bate has the answer in his book, “Why Q Needs U.” Born and raised in England and now living in Prague, Bate is a linguist, writer, broadcaster, and podcaster (A Language I Love is…), Bate admits to being obsessed by language and its history. “Nowadays, the alphabet has become so successful that we rarely recognize its achievement,” he noted in his book regarding the alphabet's development over 4,000 years. “Yet over the course of its long development, nothing is fixed, and every letter has a story to tell.” Bate tells each of the 26 letters' stories, starting logically with A. Tracing the letter’s history from Egypt, through the ancient Phoenicians to the Greeks who gave us “alpha” (as in alphabet), Bate explains how language evolves over time. There’s a certain excitement that comes with discovering where our letters come from. In his review of the book for The Times, James McConnachie seems positively elated: “I have been able to tell everyone within earshot that Q has a tail because it was once a picture of a monkey, that O used to have a dot in the middle because it used to be the Egyptian hieroglyph for an eye, and that A — bear with me here — started life as a picture of an ox’s head (because it used to represent the glottal stop that began the ancient Semitic word for ox, ’alp) and then morphed into a vowel over time while also somehow turning itself upside down, the wonderful result being that the two legs on our capital A started life as … horns. And’alp, of course, became alpha.” English has its quirks, Bate admits. We’re talking about the fact that there’s a hard c (coconut) and a soft c (cigar) and don't forget the “magic e,” which Bate explains is a split digraph. But don’t worry, it all becomes clear once you follow the explanations Bate provides.  We can thank the Romans for coming up with cursive handwriting, and we learn that the letter W is a child of the fall of Rome. Want clarification? Listen to the interview with the author.